A few days ago, YouTube released statistics for its biggest channels and it was seen that over two billion video views were missing from them. The worst hit group was Universal, which lost around 1 billion views, followed by Sony losing over 850 million views. However, the lost views were not all fake video views. This YouTube stats of two billion lost views included views from videos that were deleted over a year ago and moved to the Vevo channel instead.

Some people speculated that the real reason for these lost views was the Black Hat SEO that these music labels used to project a higher view count. However, the lost views from these channels must have appeared on Vevo, which was hosting most of these videos now. The matter was later explained by Alex Ham from Billboard, who reported,

For Universal and Sony, that meant thousands of music videos that over the past three years slowly have migrated to the VEVO channel, which is jointly owned by the two companies.

Vevo collaborated with YouTube back in 2009, and has been a major revenue generator for YouTube. However, it also caused a major change in the number of views of videos from major record labels. As the web is moving towards richer forms of media, videos have an important role to play and video views are an important factor in search ranking of videos.

Chinmoy Kanjilal is a FOSS enthusiast and evangelist. He is passionate about Android. Security exploits turn him on and he loves to tinker with computer networks. He rants occasionally at Techarraz.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @ckandroid.